Vimeo's Slow Fade: An Engineer's Front-Row Seat to the Fall of a Web Icon

An excellent dissection, but took me a minute to get through it!

I really don't know what they were thinking with trying to scare off all the little indie creatives with the pivoting to enterprise stuff, who won in that strategy? And why wasn't there room for both? They could have just left the old Vimeo in stasis for those people and created an entirely new product line that'd have been better suited, especially since they were rewriting stuff from scratch anyway.

As pointed out, if you want to win in enterprise, you have to be willing to bend over backward, which is exactly what Microsoft did/had to do to get entrenched and at least part of what locked Apple out until iOS came along.

The bit about BrightCove and the competition explains so much.

Ultimately, it sounds like the author's problems come down to being at a business which was never profitable, nor had a plan to become profitable, and thus doomed to failure. The whiplash he experienced, the upper management turnover, all speak to repeated desperate attempts to find some way to make the business work.

"Vimeo was a beloved (and major) video platform..."

Was it? "Beloved" I'll grant because who knows, someone or another loves almost anything, I guess, but was it ever "major"?

I'll admit to not being much of a video person, but to me, Vimeo was just a video player that I'd find embedded in some web page now and then. Did not come across as "major" at all, ever.

Related:

Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

I didn't realize the Bending Spoons acquisition was a second time go-round. I do know after they enshittified (sorry, "harvested called for the PE overlords") two other web properties I used and loved back in the day (Evernote, Meetup), and thus I have an unfortunate to-do list item to migrate my 1000+ video library over to something else in 2026. Currently looking at Cloudflare for the files and some kind of player on top.

Sigh.

> Vimeo was not particularly worthless, but it was also not particularly profitable either. In truth, Vimeo had always been a red-headed step child inside of IAC.

Another profitable, sustainable company sacrificed on the Altar of Unicorn(tm).

It's interesting to read this since the signals of demise are so different in the broader corporate world.

Vimeo sounds like it would have been better off as the basis for a product or service division of a much larger business, not undiversified and standing alone competing with social media. Why was that not the obvious play to follow when they saw Google buying YouTube? Seems like a lot of opportunities passed Vimeo by over the decades.

tl;dr hipster youtube has an identity crisis and falls apart

C'mon buddy, you joined a near 20-year-old company that has never defined its own raison d'etre (or didn't stick to it), never really found a niche in the marketplace, never been particularly profitable, has been passed around to multiple owners, never had any reputation for any brilliant or highly-innovative engineering (except perhaps overcoming some now-obsolete, 2004-era video limitations), and whose stock price was 70-80% below its IPO price.

Were you actually expecting no technical debt, a clear mission statement, no internal dysfunction, no bored/confused/exhausted/dont-give-a-shit coworkers, no executive carousel, and no further ownership changes?

This story reads a bit like buying an old, beat-up, rusted-out car from a stranger on the side of the road, then being surprised it doesn't run smoothly.